Various devices heretofore have been employed to immobilize a patient's body and head while transporting the patient from an accident or other site to a second treatment site such as a hospital emergency room. Often, in the case of an automobile accident or industrial injury, the patient must be transported from the injury scene to a medical facility under adverse conditions involving time, stress, weather, and/or darkness. In transporting a patient, paramedics or other medical personnel necessarily seek to minimize aggravation of injuries to a patient's cervical spine, head and neck. To accomplish this end, a patient must be secured relatively readily and efficiently on a patient body and head hold-down board, often referred to as a back or trauma board.
While various systems are available for maintaining and restraining a patient's body and head from movement during patient transport, problems prevail. It has been found with some conventional patient restraint systems, that the flexible webbed straps utilized to immobilize a patient on a trauma board extend transversely across the board. Prior to placing a patient on the board, various straps have to be moved away from the board so that the patient can be placed on the board without any hold-down straps resting under the patient. It can be appreciated that if a strap is inadvertently located on a board beneath the patient, the patient has to be moved to recover the webbed strap. This problem of strap misplacement is particularly prevalent at night at an accident scene, where proper lighting to check strap location sometimes is not available.
Additionally, it has been found that with some patient hold-down systems presently available, there are an excessive number of strap tails or buckles with which a paramedic or other medical person must contend to properly secure a patient to a trauma board. This problem often manifests itself at the location of a drowning site or other location involving water or snow where the strap tails get wet or covered with ice. Other hold-down systems utilize velcro connectors which are not always satisfactory particularly if the connectors come in contact with body fluids such as blood. It is difficult to decontaminate the velcro fasteners of such bodily fluids.
Further, various restraint systems available today utilize metal buckles or other fastening means which interfere with various radiological procedures such as an x-ray. On occasion, a patient will be brought to a medical treatment center where, prior to removing the patient from the trauma board, medical personnel choose to x-ray the patient to ascertain the nature and extent of a patient's injuries. Unfortunately, the metal components of the hold-down devices interfere with the x-ray, CAT scans or other medical procedures in that the metal components of the hold-down system tend to scatter the x-ray beam thereby providing an erroneous x-ray reading.
Similarly, various patient head and neck restraining devices are unsatisfactory because they limit access to the patient's head, eyes, ears, mouth or neck during examination and/or treatment. With other systems presently available, the patient restraints are not satisfactory because they must be either loosened excessively or completely removed to allow for an appropriate medical examination.
What is desired is to alleviate the disadvantages attendant with various prior art patient hold-down and immobilization devices. It is particularly desired to have a patient restraining device and system for relatively readily securing and restraining a patient to a trauma board utilizing flexible, webbed or other non-porous straps which do not suffer the disadvantages of being lodged under a patient or trailing from the trauma board. It also is desired to have a system whereby a patient can be strapped to a trauma board relatively easily but, yet, very effectively whereby the patient is properly immobilized. Moreover, it is desired that a patient's head be relatively readily accessible to medical personnel while the patient's head is restrained on the trauma board.
Finally, it also is desired that the components of the patient trauma board retention device be made of materials which do not interfere with the x-ray or other radiological procedures carried out on a patient while the patient is restrained to a trauma board.